Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law) : Movie Review
December 17, 2009 by Sean Lynch
Filed under Movie Reviews, Movies
What is it about Murder Mysteries that humans (or, more to the point, elderly ABC viewers) just love?
Finally, Guy Ritchie is taking back the ye olde English detective tale for the young’uns of the world with a shiny new spin on the classic Sherlock Holmes.
In a dynamic new portrayal of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous characters, Sherlock Holmes sends Holmes (Iron Man’s Robert Downey Jr) and his (hetro-life) partner Watson (Jude Law) on their latest challenge in which they must uncover the secrets of a homicidal murderer (who has returned from the dead) and has more than a few tricks up his sleeve (literally) that could allow him to out-smart the genius that is Sherlock Holmes!
Sherlock Holmes : Quality Reimagining
WHAT’S THE BUZZ
Christmas holiday flicks just don’t get much better than Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes. It’s stylish, it’s flashy, the cast is A-List all the way – and it is bloody good fun from start to finish.
Even better is that this version of Sherlock Holmes is intelligent, while still being totally accessible and entertaining to pretty much everyone (none of this Bourne Identity stuff where there are so many twists and turns you need a flow chart just to get past the first 3o minutes).
Think of it as a summer superhero flick, except instead of lazer vision – our hero has the power of “deduction”.
Robert Downey Jr is excellent once again as the eccentric, grubby and occasionally camp Holmes (a far cry from the Holmes of old), Law proves he is more than just “that sleaze from Alfie“, and Rachel McAdams is feisty (without ever actually being as memorable as the studio might want her to be).
Guy Ritchie’s visuals are smack-bang on form (upping the skill-ante from the “Almost there but not quite” RocknRolla), with his love of cut-back-and-forth narrative perfectly in sync with the story Sherlock Holmes needs to tell.
Kudos also goes to Ritchie for the fact he managed to avoid going all Wild Wild West and giving the past that weird “future science in the past” angle, which he easily could have done here.
If anything, he has gone “Let’s do for Ye Olde England what Pirates Of The Caribbean did for the boat sailing industry” (even getting composer Hans Zimmer on board… the only man in Hollywood that manages to rip his own material off and get away with it) and Ritchie succeeds on every level with 90 odd minutes of pure escapist fun.
You might not need to rush out and see it multiple times, but ultimately Sherlock Holmes delivers good old fashioned entertainment in spades and well worth putting on the “Must See” list once your work holiday time kicks in.
Great, smart, action packed fun.
WATCH OUT FOR
The art of deduction… and how it comes in handy during a fight. The costumes are fair impressive as well, ay gov’ner
WATCH OUT FOR | RATING : 4 / 5
